It was explained with plenty of hard science fiction - a human subspecies missing the ability to produce a key biological compound, leading to a host of other adaptations to allow the vampires to successfully hunt regular humans, including different brain wiring, hibernation ability, and an unfortunate mental glitch having to do with right angles, which lead to them going extinct way before modern times. They were then brought back through some genetic archeology work.
You'd only get noise cancellation at the rough area around the microphone is, assuming you'd account for the speaker-microphone distance. You have to cancel phase _everywhere_ for it to work for a room, and you can't do that, really, without a huge array of speakers, or speakers exactly co-located with noise sources.
So you could do it in software for headphones, since you just need to cancel noise right at the headphones, which is fine. But it's no good for speakers, unless you have very specific configurations of noise sources that lend themselves to simple cancellation. In general, no way.
But can I get Firefox to display google search as an option in the address field drop-down, like it does in Mozilla? Even easier than prepending a 'g '
Moral rights are not, I'm fairly sure, codified anywhere in US copyright law, which derives directly from the Consitution's IP clauses.
Many European copyright laws are founded on moral rights to created works claims, but the US laws are theoretically based on overall benefit to society. Therefore, I don't think a legal argument from a moral rights basis will have much support in a US court. (IANAL, etc)
Polar orbit, with satellite roll axis fixed on a guide star for a good reference frame. I think it's about as circular as they can make it.
And yeah, it's superfluid helium, enough for about 18 months given the boil-off rate (it boils off continually to maintain dewar temperature; the boiled-off gas is actually used in the precision manouvering thrusters)
And the suspension system is a rather scary system... it has to ramp from barely touching the gyros to making sure they don't impact the cavity walls when a micrometeorite hits almost instantaneously. And there's only about a millimeter of clearance there. And the gyros spin at 10,000 rpm. You don't want them touching the walls.
Well, I'm not a physicist; I just played around on the hardware.
But it looks like to me that LATOR is a very-high precision test of what's already been tested several times: the exact amount of curvature of spacetime that heavy objects create.
GP-B tests the effects of frame dragging, which is a completely separate effect.
As to SUMO, I wouldn't be able to say what kind of effect a Lorentz-transform symmetry breaking would cause, and whether GP-B's results could be affected by that. But the tests seem to be fundamentally about clock rates at various moving frames, which is more of a special relativity test (as the Loretz transform comes from special relativity). GP-B is about general relativity, and specifically about spin, which seems to be relatively untested ground.
Just about all of the engineering that's gone into the project is to eliminate interference from everything else; those gyros are going to be just about the best-isolated objects we've ever made.
Yes, they need to account for solar wind, as well as atmospheric drag, as small as it is at that height. This is done by flying the satellite drag-free; one of the gyros free-floats inside its housing, and if it starts to drift off-center, the satellite fires its thrusters to reposition _the satellite_ so that the free-floating gyro is again in the center of its cavity.
This way, any external force on the satellite can be removed, since the gyro is shielded from them by the bulk of the satellite, and the satellite then follows the gyro on a perfect gravitational orbit.
Magnetic fields are filtered out to some ungodly factor; the leftover fields inside the science probe are on the of 10^-17 gauss.
They also account for micrometeorites, electric noise, and many other error sources. There's a reason this has taken 40 years.
At my current job (intern job, anyway) just about everyone has a laptop instead of a desktop machine (ok, more accurately, I have both; the desktop is a linux system for development, the laptop is windows for email/etc).
Since nearly all the vulnerable machines are laptops to begin with, I don't see additional firewalls here being helpful, unless each laptop runs its own.
On the frequency point... Digital cell phones use (at least GSM phones do, don't know the CDMA frequencies) both 900 MHz bands and 1.8 GHz bands (1.9 GHz in the US, because the 1.8 GHz band is reserved for.mil use in the US). It depends on what the base stations in the area are using.
In general, digital signals can get through a much worse signal-to-noise ratio (after all, all you have to pick up is a 0 or 1), and should therefore be more robust than analog, especially with basic error correction thrown in. You'd need to compare the transmission/reception power levels to see if the digital phone is really doing worse. If the digital base station is transmitting at X watts, and the analog base station is transmitting at 3X watts, yeah, the analog might come through better.
Of course, better battery life isn't a bad thing either...
Uh, having worked at one of the companies you mention, I can definately tell you that they designed their own systems from scratch.
Sure, for most Palm devices, the processors are the same - Palm OS runs on Dragonballs, at least until Palm OS 5.0 comes out. And you know, memory's memory. LCD screens are made by several manufacturers, I'd assume, as are buttons and such, but since the devices run the same (lightweight) OS, they're bound to be pretty similar inside.
The hard part is fitting it all together into the form factor, and adding whatever extra functionality your version offers. Those things are crammed _very_ tight.
But no, there's no mysterious reference design for this stuff; it's like saying all x86 manufacturer's motherboards can run the same code, and therefore they must all be supplied from the same source.
A basic PDA circuit diagram is pretty straightforward. RAM, ROM, CPU, LCD interface, LCD, button interface, buttons. If it weren't for the size, cost, and other design constraints, a second-year EE student could design a bare-bones system.
Some companies also have licensing, patent, etc issues with regards to releasing spec details.
I've seen people claim that nVidia, especially, can't provide open source drivers because they use methods licenced from elsewhere in their code. Whether that's true, and whether that's the only reason they don't open their drivers, who knows.
But if that is the case, it's unlikely that any amount of protest will help, if they're legally bound to keep this stuff secret.
So now I have other questions. Do you hit "30-second skip" on your ReplayTV remote while watching prerecorded shows? If you don't own a ReplayTV, do you fast forward through the commercials at the start of a video tape? Do you wait for the end of a TV show to go to the bathroom, or do you temporarily forget your ethics, sneak out and do it while the commercials are on? Are you taking a free ride then?
The crucial difference here is that it doesn't cost the TV station any money to broadcast to you; they're sending the broadcast out to everyone already. You watching or not watching the ads will not incur additional costs on them.
However, you visiting a website incurs a cost to that website, for the bandwidth you use. This, in my mind, changes the ethical argument significantly. As long as your use of the material doesn't cost the provider anything more than it would have had you not used the material, I see nothing wrong in skipping ads. But if they incur a cost to provide me the material, and expect me to see a few ads to cover those expenses (and many web sites are currently just trying to make enough to stay online), I have ethical problems in blocking the ads from the site.
Granted, that doesn't mean I want the ads to be giant flash-popup-steal-focus-fullscreen-fullsound-all- singing-all-dancing-extravaganza (I block javascript popups in Mozilla), but standard banner ads are in my mind reasonable.
Re:Bad perhaps
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From a few months back, on the Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/20863.ht ml
Seems like Google's been making money for a while now, mainly on licensing their search technology for intranets, as well as the online ads.
The Corporate Google device is just what they're selling now, but even more customer-friendly. Don't see why it'd not work.
Here is a link to the US Patent Office Guidelines on Determining Utilitity, especially for gene patents.
Note that the 'responses to public comments' are more interesting than the guidelines themselves. But in short, they are supposed to have a specific, known utility before allowing a gene sequence to be patented.
Guidelines It starts halfway in the first page. (pdf)
Well, there is currently (at least in the US) no actual GPRS network outside of test sites, and from what I've heard, it'll take a few months before those networks will be up.
The Treo is definately intended for a GPRS upgrade, and that upgrade looks to arrive roughly around when GPRS actually starts being available.
As for graffiti, after using this thing for a few weeks, I became a keyboard convert. You can run it off just the jog rocker for many things, and typing an email on a keyboard (which is very usable) takes a heck of a lot less time than graffiti.
I wouldn't call anything that consists of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen simple, neccessarily. Sure,it could be, but then again, living organisms are also made in large parts of carbon(very major), hydrogen(also major), and nitrogen(all proteins need it, at least).
So there's no oxygen, but still, a polymer of these can be very complex.
It's been my understanding that fuel cell cars _are_ electric vehicles. The fuel cell combines hydrogen and oxygen into our friend H2O, and produces electricity as a result (the reverse of the standard water-splitting reaction, catalyzed by electricity). It's a battery replacement, not an engine.
Then you'd just hook your favorite electric motor to the output (with a buffer battery in the middle, I'd assume) and off you go.
Of course, you'll need to come up with a good fuel source; something to get hydrogen from (from what I understand, pure hydrogen isn't all that energy-dense. Methane or something would be better).
Worked at GPB last summer, wrote some code for the systems that keep the gyros levitated.
The gyros are free-floating quarz spheres, coated with a layer of niobium. They are surrounded by four electrode plates, which keep the gyros centered in their housing in case of micrometeorite, etc impacts. (they can handle up to about 1 kg*m/s of impulse)
The gyros are spun up by running high-velocity helium gas by them (helium because there's a lot of it onboard, the whole assembly is cooled with liquid helium) to a speed of around 10,000 rpm. This is a one-time thing, they can't respeed them up (would ruin the data)
Because of the liquid helium cooling, the niobium will superconduct, and a spinning superconductor creates a magnetic field precisely aligned with its spin axis. This is measured by a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device)
I don't know if they measure the spin rate or not.
The satellite follows a free-floating proof mass in its center to maintain a pure gravitational orbit, so the gyros won't drift offcenter much, unless there are micrometeorite impacts or other forces.
I worked on this project last summer (granted, it wasn't exactly at the high levels) but I picked up a decent amount of background information.
First, the gyros are tested extensively, for smoothness and consistency. They're not that hard to test, really. The hard part was making the darn things. If you blew up one of the gyros to be the size of the earth, the largest height difference would be around 16 feet. They're smooth.
Besides, NASA didn't make these. Stanford's laboratories did, if that makes any difference. The whole project is an effort between Stanford and Lockheed (with NASA funding, to be sure).
And 4 gyroscopes is for redundancy. They only really need two, I believe, and the gyros are not measured off each other. Instead, they are all referenced to a guide star which is tracked by a telescope on satellite.
Slashdot Mirror
It was explained with plenty of hard science fiction - a human subspecies missing the ability to produce a key biological compound, leading to a host of other adaptations to allow the vampires to successfully hunt regular humans, including different brain wiring, hibernation ability, and an unfortunate mental glitch having to do with right angles, which lead to them going extinct way before modern times. They were then brought back through some genetic archeology work.
No, you can get from one end of SF to the other with a single ticket. Google's in mountain view, about 35 miles and ~8-10 cities away.
You'd only get noise cancellation at the rough area around the microphone is, assuming you'd account for the speaker-microphone distance. You have to cancel phase _everywhere_ for it to work for a room, and you can't do that, really, without a huge array of speakers, or speakers exactly co-located with noise sources.
So you could do it in software for headphones, since you just need to cancel noise right at the headphones, which is fine. But it's no good for speakers, unless you have very specific configurations of noise sources that lend themselves to simple cancellation. In general, no way.
The keyword feature is in Mozilla, too, you know.
But can I get Firefox to display google search as an option in the address field drop-down, like it does in Mozilla? Even easier than prepending a 'g '
Yeah, because a machine with a 640x480x480 voxel display only needs to have 640*480*480*4 bytes of storage for its framebuffer.
That's only 562 megabytes or so, after all. Ok, you say, that's about the average main memory a machine these days has. We can work with that. But:
Updated at 60 fps, this requires a memory bandwidth of 60*562 MB = 33 gigabytes/sec.
DDR 4000 RAM currently has a bandwidth of 4000 MB/s. PCI-X slots are at best in the same range.
I'm just saying, think about this a little first. It may not be undoable, but you make it sound like a cakewalk, which it really isn't.
Moral rights are not, I'm fairly sure, codified anywhere in US copyright law, which derives directly from the Consitution's IP clauses.
Many European copyright laws are founded on moral rights to created works claims, but the US laws are theoretically based on overall benefit to society. Therefore, I don't think a legal argument from a moral rights basis will have much support in a US court. (IANAL, etc)
Polar orbit, with satellite roll axis fixed on a guide star for a good reference frame. I think it's about as circular as they can make it.
And yeah, it's superfluid helium, enough for about 18 months given the boil-off rate (it boils off continually to maintain dewar temperature; the boiled-off gas is actually used in the precision manouvering thrusters)
And the suspension system is a rather scary system... it has to ramp from barely touching the gyros to making sure they don't impact the cavity walls when a micrometeorite hits almost instantaneously. And there's only about a millimeter of clearance there. And the gyros spin at 10,000 rpm. You don't want them touching the walls.
Well, I'm not a physicist; I just played around on the hardware.
But it looks like to me that LATOR is a very-high precision test of what's already been tested several times: the exact amount of curvature of spacetime that heavy objects create.
GP-B tests the effects of frame dragging, which is a completely separate effect.
As to SUMO, I wouldn't be able to say what kind of effect a Lorentz-transform symmetry breaking would cause, and whether GP-B's results could be affected by that. But the tests seem to be fundamentally about clock rates at various moving frames, which is more of a special relativity test (as the Loretz transform comes from special relativity). GP-B is about general relativity, and specifically about spin, which seems to be relatively untested ground.
Having worked on GP-B for a bit...
Just about all of the engineering that's gone into the project is to eliminate interference from everything else; those gyros are going to be just about the best-isolated objects we've ever made.
Yes, they need to account for solar wind, as well as atmospheric drag, as small as it is at that height. This is done by flying the satellite drag-free; one of the gyros free-floats inside its housing, and if it starts to drift off-center, the satellite fires its thrusters to reposition _the satellite_ so that the free-floating gyro is again in the center of its cavity.
This way, any external force on the satellite can be removed, since the gyro is shielded from them by the bulk of the satellite, and the satellite then follows the gyro on a perfect gravitational orbit.
Magnetic fields are filtered out to some ungodly factor; the leftover fields inside the science probe are on the of 10^-17 gauss.
They also account for micrometeorites, electric noise, and many other error sources. There's a reason this has taken 40 years.
At my current job (intern job, anyway) just about everyone has a laptop instead of a desktop machine (ok, more accurately, I have both; the desktop is a linux system for development, the laptop is windows for email/etc).
Since nearly all the vulnerable machines are laptops to begin with, I don't see additional firewalls here being helpful, unless each laptop runs its own.
Because that's not the problem.
There's a company that makes a web-browser called Phoenix, I believe for embedded systems.
On the frequency point... Digital cell phones use (at least GSM phones do, don't know the CDMA frequencies) both 900 MHz bands and 1.8 GHz bands (1.9 GHz in the US, because the 1.8 GHz band is reserved for .mil use in the US). It depends on what the base stations in the area are using.
In general, digital signals can get through a much worse signal-to-noise ratio (after all, all you have to pick up is a 0 or 1), and should therefore be more robust than analog, especially with basic error correction thrown in. You'd need to compare the transmission/reception power levels to see if the digital phone is really doing worse. If the digital base station is transmitting at X watts, and the analog base station is transmitting at 3X watts, yeah, the analog might come through better.
Of course, better battery life isn't a bad thing either...
Uh, having worked at one of the companies you mention, I can definately tell you that they designed their own systems from scratch.
Sure, for most Palm devices, the processors are the same - Palm OS runs on Dragonballs, at least until Palm OS 5.0 comes out. And you know, memory's memory. LCD screens are made by several manufacturers, I'd assume, as are buttons and such, but since the devices run the same (lightweight) OS, they're bound to be pretty similar inside.
The hard part is fitting it all together into the form factor, and adding whatever extra functionality your version offers. Those things are crammed _very_ tight.
But no, there's no mysterious reference design for this stuff; it's like saying all x86 manufacturer's motherboards can run the same code, and therefore they must all be supplied from the same source.
A basic PDA circuit diagram is pretty straightforward. RAM, ROM, CPU, LCD interface, LCD, button interface, buttons. If it weren't for the size, cost, and other design constraints, a second-year EE student could design a bare-bones system.
Some companies also have licensing, patent, etc issues with regards to releasing spec details.
I've seen people claim that nVidia, especially, can't provide open source drivers because they use methods licenced from elsewhere in their code. Whether that's true, and whether that's the only reason they don't open their drivers, who knows.
But if that is the case, it's unlikely that any amount of protest will help, if they're legally bound to keep this stuff secret.
The crucial difference here is that it doesn't cost the TV station any money to broadcast to you; they're sending the broadcast out to everyone already. You watching or not watching the ads will not incur additional costs on them.
However, you visiting a website incurs a cost to that website, for the bandwidth you use. This,
in my mind, changes the ethical argument significantly. As long as your use of the material doesn't cost the provider anything more than it would have had you not used the material, I see nothing wrong in skipping ads. But if they incur a cost to provide me the material, and expect me to see a few ads to cover those expenses (and many web sites are currently just trying to make enough to stay online), I have ethical problems in blocking the ads from the site.
Granted, that doesn't mean I want the ads to be giant flash-popup-steal-focus-fullscreen-fullsound-all-
singing-all-dancing-extravaganza (I block javascript popups in Mozilla), but standard banner ads are in my mind reasonable.
From a few months back, on the Register:
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/20863.h
Seems like Google's been making money for a while now, mainly on licensing their search technology for intranets, as well as the online ads.
The Corporate Google device is just what they're selling now, but even more customer-friendly. Don't see why it'd not work.
Here is a link to the US Patent Office Guidelines on Determining Utilitity, especially for gene patents.
Note that the 'responses to public comments' are more interesting than the guidelines themselves. But in short, they are supposed to have a specific, known utility before allowing a gene sequence to be patented.
Guidelines
It starts halfway in the first page. (pdf)
Well, there is currently (at least in the US) no actual GPRS network outside of test sites, and from what I've heard, it'll take a few months before those networks will be up.
The Treo is definately intended for a GPRS upgrade, and that upgrade looks to arrive roughly around when GPRS actually starts being available.
As for graffiti, after using this thing for a few weeks, I became a keyboard convert. You can run it off just the jog rocker for many things, and typing an email on a keyboard (which is very usable) takes a heck of a lot less time than graffiti.
Um... Note that they're selling both a 900/1900 version, and a 900/1800 version, which is targeted to Europe.
I'd assume that's what you'd want.
I wouldn't call anything that consists of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen simple, neccessarily. Sure ,it could be, but then again, living organisms are also made in large parts of carbon(very major), hydrogen(also major), and nitrogen(all proteins need it, at least).
So there's no oxygen, but still, a polymer of these can be very complex.
And charge, too. Though the amount of ionized matter you'd need to charge a black hole is pretty significant.
Well, it might be a after-posting change, but the topic of this article seems to be anime to me, so I don't see what the complaining is about.
But if it was changed after the initial posting of the story, then never mind...
It's been my understanding that fuel cell cars _are_ electric vehicles. The fuel cell combines hydrogen and oxygen into our friend H2O, and produces electricity as a result (the reverse of the standard water-splitting reaction, catalyzed by electricity). It's a battery replacement, not an engine.
Then you'd just hook your favorite electric motor to the output (with a buffer battery in the middle, I'd assume) and off you go.
Of course, you'll need to come up with a good fuel source; something to get hydrogen from (from what I understand, pure hydrogen isn't all that energy-dense. Methane or something would be better).
Worked at GPB last summer, wrote some code for the systems that keep the gyros levitated.
The gyros are free-floating quarz spheres, coated with a layer of niobium. They are surrounded by four electrode plates, which keep the gyros centered in their housing in case of micrometeorite, etc impacts. (they can handle up to about 1 kg*m/s of impulse)
The gyros are spun up by running high-velocity helium gas by them (helium because there's a lot of it onboard, the whole assembly is cooled with liquid helium) to a speed of around 10,000 rpm. This is a one-time thing, they can't respeed them up (would ruin the data)
Because of the liquid helium cooling, the niobium will superconduct, and a spinning superconductor creates a magnetic field precisely aligned with its spin axis. This is measured by a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device)
I don't know if they measure the spin rate or not.
The satellite follows a free-floating proof mass in its center to maintain a pure gravitational orbit, so the gyros won't drift offcenter much, unless there are micrometeorite impacts or other forces.
I worked on this project last summer (granted, it wasn't exactly at the high levels) but I picked up a decent amount of background information.
First, the gyros are tested extensively, for smoothness and consistency. They're not that hard to test, really. The hard part was making the darn things. If you blew up one of the gyros to be the size of the earth, the largest height difference would be around 16 feet. They're smooth.
Besides, NASA didn't make these. Stanford's laboratories did, if that makes any difference. The whole project is an effort between Stanford and Lockheed (with NASA funding, to be sure).
And 4 gyroscopes is for redundancy. They only really need two, I believe, and the gyros are not measured off each other. Instead, they are all referenced to a guide star which is tracked by a telescope on satellite.